Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Crows Make Mental Templates.

  

  Weintraub points to further studies from the University of Aukland School of Psychology on the extraordinary New Caledonian crows that have been shown to learn... Read more

  Posted on 20 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Perceptual and Judgement Creep.

  

  Fascinating work by Gilbert and colleagues: Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to... Read more

  Posted on 19 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Authentic Lies.

  Hahl et al. suggest how a blatantly lying demagogue (guess who?) can be perceived as authentic: We develop and test a theory to address a puzzling pattern that... Read more

  Posted on 18 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Social Media and the Emergence of Violence During Protests.

  The social media, and especially Twitter, are now integral to modern political behavior, with events online both reflecting and influencing actions offline.... Read more

  Posted on 17 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What is Consciousness, and Could Machines Have It?

  I want to point to a lucid article by Dehaene, Lau, and Koulder that gives the most clear review I have seen of our current state of knowledge on the nature of... Read more

  Posted on 16 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Playing with Proteins in Virtual Reality.

  Much of my mental effort while I was doing laboratory research on the mechanisms of visual transduction (changing light into a nerve signal in our retinal rod... Read more

  Posted on 13 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Increasing Despair Among Poor Americans.

  A survey by Goldman et al. of more than 4,600 American adults conducted in 1995-1996 and in 2011-2014 suggests that among individuals of low socioeconomic... Read more

  Posted on 12 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Fundamental Advance in Brain Imaging Techniques.

  

  I want to pass on the abstract, along with a bit of text and two figures, from an article by Coalson, Van Essen, and Glasser that argues for a fundamental chang... Read more

  Posted on 11 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mindfulness Training Increases Strength of Right Insula Connections.

  

  Sharp et al.(open source) suggest that: The endeavor to understand how mindfulness works will likely be advanced by using recently developed tools and theory... Read more

  Posted on 10 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mortality Rates Level off at Extreme Age

  Interesting work from Barbi et al. showing that human death rates increase exponentially up to about age 80, then decelerate, and plateau after age 105. Read more

  Posted on 09 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Imaging Predicts Who Will Be a Good Musical Performer.

  Fascinating observations from Zatorre's group: Significance In sophisticated auditory–motor learning such as musical instrument learning, little is understood... Read more

  Posted on 06 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Are Religious People Trusted More?

  A prevailing view is that religious behavior facilitate trust, primarily toward coreligionists, and particularly when it is diagnostic of belief in moralizing... Read more

  Posted on 05 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Seven Creepy Facebook Patents

  I'll follow yesterday's post with yet another post on creepy high tech patents, this time from Facebook, showing their ongoing intention to invade our privacy a... Read more

  Posted on 04 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Patent for Emotional Robots?

  I recently received an interesting email from Deepak Gupta, who is with a patent research services company, who, having seen my post on robots and emotion,... Read more

  Posted on 03 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• An Optimistic Outlook Creates a Rosy Past.

  From Devitt and Schacter in the Harvard Psychology department, a study recruiting the usual gaggle of psychology undergraduate students as subjects: People... Read more

  Posted on 02 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Stress and Autoimmune Disease

  I am now in my 77th year, and not all that pleased that my inflammatory, immune, and stress systems are becoming more excitable, more likely to be activated by... Read more

  Posted on 29 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Social Media and Democracy

  This post passes on links to articles on social media discussed recently in the Univ. of Wisconsin Chaos and Complex Systems seminar that I attend. Read more

  Posted on 28 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Philosophy We Need: Personalism

  To his credit, David Brooks keeps searching for moral visions that might be an antidote to our current social and political malaise. A recent Op-Ed piece is on... Read more

  Posted on 27 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mindfulness Can Lower Your Motivation.

  Vohs and Hafenbrack do an NYTimes opinion piece to advertise their forthcoming paper on effects of meditation. Given my personal experience with 'mindfulness'... Read more

  Posted on 26 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Deep Origins of Consciousness

  I want to recommend an engaging book by Peter Godfrey-Smith that I have read recently, "Other Minds: The Octopus, theSea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Read more

  Posted on 25 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE